India is far behind than other emerging Asian economies in protecting its data despite having a huge IT industry, said senior official of Singapore-based new generation data protection firm, which is expanding its operations in the country.

"India is absolutely in our global plans to investigate (study) and invest," said Jan-Jaap Jager, the vice president and general manager of emerging markets at Acronis International Pvt Ltd.

Presently it has one distributor in the country, Bangalore-based Asiaa Data Pvt Ltd.

"I would like to have a representation in North, South, East and West," he said of the company's future plans for the Indian market.

The world including India is not protecting their data, said Jager expressing concern about data management, hacking and software piracy.

"India is not rated high in the data protection though it has a huge IT sector," Jager told PTI after the launch of Acronis Access 7 for the Asian markets.

In Asia, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Australia and even Vietnam were far ahead in protecting data when compared to India.

In large markets like China and India, a huge volume of software was being pirated, observed Jager, acknowledging mammoth challenges in estimating volume of the unprotected data globally and in India.

"Opportunities for innovation and growth in the area of data protection, secure file access and sharing and disaster- recovery solutions across physical, virtual and cloud-based environments are tremendous," said Acronis co-founder and chief executive Serguei Beloussov.